One disclaimer about Adware and Malware, Android is very secure and doesn`t just download malware from a malicious site or something. It has to be downloaded by the user, consciously. An informed Android user does not have to worry about these things, just has to be responsible. The uninformed just need to be cautious, and inform themselves. Android experience is very much dependent on the user being responsible for their own device.

You are right and I take responsibility for what I put on my phone. I had a couple of friends that downloaded tons of stuff to their phone. I am not sure they ever had any malware running, but they certainly had a ton of apps that ran in the background eating up their memory and CPU. So their Android experiences were less than rewarding. So they switched to iPhone and love it.

I guess it also depends largely on how you define "Malware". I recently downloaded an app that put ads in my notification bar. If that's not malware it is at least crap ware.

Since Google offers a way to install apps outside the market, I sometimes wish they would tighten down a little more. But that's just me.

I do hope Safari is fixed, it crashes 4 or 5 time an hour for me.
Note that is on my iPad one. Right now I have iOS 5.1 installed on my iPhone 4 and have a bit of use under the belt. It does look to be very stable, faster and with far less glitches. Hopefully this is a good sign.

As to memory, it will help Safari a lot but Safari has many a bug that leads to all sorts of performance issues. Especially troublesome are the ones that force page reloads. If they have corrected these issues I could see my data usage going down.

Wow! 4 or 5 times an hour? What sites are you visiting that result in so many crashes? If it isn't specific web sites, you definitely have defective hardware. Guess you'll just have to upgrade.

Would be nice if there was a developer option to turn on true multitasking though. Sometimes I'm running a web application that gets all screwed up just because I switch over for a sec to change the music.

Lost progress on web apps is more a function of hardcore memory conservation than multiprocessing. Changing from one tab to another can do the same thing in iOS Safari, and that is not even changing applications. The forced page reloads is a way to guarantee that an inactive TAB has no large memory required footprint. Moving from a native app to another with those kind of problems would indicate less than optimal state preservation by the app developer.

I'm hoping that at some point the additional memory allows Apple to be just a little less time aggressive at reclaiming "inactive" RAM on iOS devices. I don't know if 1GB is enough to allow that or not though.

A lot of it is easy to figure out, but a few items can't be confirmed until we have a teardown.

Gorilla Glass 2 is 20% thinner, so Apple took that space (and more) to put in a much bigger battery. A portion of the additional RAM will have to go to the GPU, so we don't know what end users will get in terms of free RAM.

We don't know which GPU and at what clock speed the new ipad will have. Even if the new ipad just has a 543MP4 --- it doesn't mean that it will be 50% slower graphics than the ipad 2 (i.e. double the number of GPU cores but have to push 4x the pixel count = 50% slower graphics). Maybe Apple increases the clock speed of the GPU.

Lost progress on web apps is more a function of hardcore memory conservation than multiprocessing. Changing from one tab to another can do the same thing in iOS Safari, and that is not even changing applications. The forced page reloads is a way to guarantee that an inactive TAB has no large memory required footprint. Moving from a native app to another with those kind of problems would indicate less than optimal state preservation by the app developer.

I'm hoping that at some point the additional memory allows Apple to be just a little less time aggressive at reclaiming "inactive" RAM on iOS devices. I don't know if 1GB is enough to allow that or not though.

How could Apple be less aggressive? Isn't RAM reclaimed only when needed by something else? It seems that this is a factor of resource availability, not an aggressive strategy.

Depending upon the specifIcs of the improvements to that GPU the actual on screen performance could very well be a wash. We will have to wait and see. Otherwise you are right RAM is very important here as is the GPU.

Basic UI functionality is pretty non-taxing for a GPU. Until you introduce real-time transparency in elements, not just shadows, the GPU hardly notices. Pushing more pixels to a frame buffer is pretty easy too as that pixel to frame buffer relationship is all dedicated transistors. So doubling the basic processing units for 4x the pixels is a non linear relationship in favor of good GUI operation.

On the flip side 4x the pixels is far more taxing for advanced graphics and blending when used in things like games or photo/video compositing/editing. So the 2x GPU capabilities probably just got performance to the place Apple was comfortable in going to the hi-res display for those apps.

And Apple is in a good place because I don't see iPad changing resolutions again for a long time, so increases in component performance will directly turn into user percieved increased device performance. Contrast that against desktops and laptops where the screen sizes/resolution keep increasing to eat up all available GPU performance.

How could Apple be less aggressive? Isn't RAM reclaimed only when needed by something else? It seems that this is a factor of resource availability, not an aggressive strategy.

Not in iOS, there are different design philosophies for the embedded device design compared to the full laptop/desktop design. The first directly impacting issue is there is no backing store in the iOS virtual memory (VM) subsystem. So RAM that is left in the inactive queue indefinitely in OS X (as long as the user does not need it) is not left there in iOS. The forced refresh of web pages when moving from tab to tab is a direct reflection of this as when you move from tab A to tab B, tab A's view is/was not maintained in RAM for instant loading upon return to tab A.

Lots of other examples of why the app switching state saving is the way it is are for the same reasons in the basic VM subsystem. At some point with more RAM available the tradeoff becomes possible to not immediately free the inactive memory. Where Apple will decide that line is exactly I don't know, but I do know for static pages on my original iPad Safari on 5.1 is acting more nicely this way where several days ago I was always seeing full page refreshes no matter what.

God, I hope so. That's the most frustrating thing about the iPad. Quite a few times, I'll enter some text, say in a window at a site like this, switch to another tab to grab a link, & when I switch back, the page refreshes & my text is gone. If I want to write anything at all involved on a message board, I do it in notes, then copy and paste the thing. It's a pain.

Also, I hope iOS 5.1 does something about Safari's bad crashiness. It's nice that it auto-recovers the links that were open when it crashed, but I have to re-launch it 4 or 5 times a day, it seems like.

Glad to know I'm not the only one experiencing this. I don't know what was worse, the constant Safari crashes or page refreshes. And this would happen to me whether I had 2 tabs going or 5. It didn't seem to matter. That's why I'm so excited to get 3rd gen iPad next week.

Not in iOS, there are different design philosophies for the embedded device design compared to the full laptop/desktop design. The first directly impacting issue is there is no backing store in the iOS virtual memory (VM) subsystem. So RAM that is left in the inactive queue indefinitely in OS X (as long as the user does not need it) is not left there in iOS. The forced refresh of web pages when moving from tab to tab is a direct reflection of this as when you move from tab A to tab B, tab A's view is/was not maintained in RAM for instant loading upon return to tab A.

Lots of other examples of why the app switching state saving is the way it is are for the same reasons in the basic VM subsystem. At some point with more RAM available the tradeoff becomes possible to not immediately free the inactive memory. Where Apple will decide that line is exactly I don't know, but I do know for static pages on my original iPad Safari on 5.1 is acting more nicely this way where several days ago I was always seeing full page refreshes no matter what.

That's a fine description.

To be specific, we were discussing how safari tabs are lost when memory is reclaimed for other purposes. Observation as a user has lead me to believe that this is not done proactively. If that is the case, it isn't possible for apple to be "less aggressive" about when cached tabs are lost.

Your experience of not seeing any tabs being cached is surprising. My experience is the opposite. Safari's cache is preserved unless that memory is needed by some other app or tab. I've grown somewhat proficient at predicting when tabs will need to be reloaded. This allows switching between a half filled out web form and another tab... if you're careful about not loading too heavy of a page it is possible to view other pages and not lose that data entry.

With that said, i think apple has made excellent decisions regarding the trade offs associated with spec-ing mobile devices While perhaps not perfect, the end result has been superior to any other approach the entire rest of the industry has tried.

First off, Android is most definitely Linux based. Google just decided to make it's own Java implementation to run most of Android applications. I think they are probably regretting that. First, it does have performance issues. Especially when you cram it on some of the cheap devices that run Android. Also, since Android went mainstream (maybe even because of Android), Oracle acquired Sun and has aggressively perused anyone with so called "unlicensed" Java implementations. Android Java was actually based on Apache's Java implementation which was already in dispute, so it was a poor, poor decision for Google for that reason alone.

That said, you can write Android software in C++ or even Objective C. In fact, it is encouraged for games.

That is truth. That is fact.

I guess I am an idiot for liking my iPad and having an Android phone I actually like. There are things my phone does that my wife could never do with her iPhone, and my phone is not rooted. The extras I have matter to me and keep me from buying an iPhone. They are things that matter on my phone, but do not matter on my tablet.

Believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons to choose Android over iOS. I do not believe Apple is an evil empire that destroys your freedom. I am perfectly fine with Apple controlling the experience on their devices. Some times though, it boils down to function over form.

I hate to say this because I know people will attack me without knowing what they are talking about. This is the reality though. I have over a year with both iOS and Android:

Apple has a major edge over Android on style and ease of use. No doubt.

Android has a major edge over Apple on capability and customization. No doubt.

Android also has malware, background process that can cripple your device, and ad ware. It isn't for everyone. But if you want freedom to customize, your choices are Android or a jailbroken iPhone.

THAT'S the reality. Decide what matters to you and make your choice.

Personally, I don't find it to be as easy as most people. I supposed that makes me a moron for not being brainwashed that actually thinking rationally. I need to upgrade my phone soon and I am still leaning towards Android since I now have a Macbook and an iPad. Of course, I need to learn more about jailbreaking. A jailbroken iPhone might be the best of both worlds.

Did you really think I was being serious? I guess you missed my reply to the other guy who thought I was being serious too.

Also, the Tegra 3 is only just catching up to the *year-old* iPad 2 and its A5?

nVidia`s ARM chips suck. Tegra 2 was the worst performing dual-core chipset, Tegra 3 will be the worst quad core. Qualcomm`s S4 (which is coming out in the new HTC smartphones) is much quicker than the Tegra 3 despite only being dual-core.

Apparently, Huawei`s quad-core K3 chipset is significantly quicker than the Tegra 3, and maybe even the S4 (Huawei are touting it as the world`s quickest smartphone chipset), and then the new Exynos chips will likely be unveiled soon, not to mention the ARM A15, etc...

In 1975, the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research's first official customer in 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) for serial number 3. <...>

The 80 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the two first models <...>

In 1979 I was programming on the TRS-80. It's Z80 had an frequency of 1.77 MHz (I had to look that up, I thought it was about 2.5MHz but if I remember correctly the frequency was updated later on) and no floating point instructions, not even integer multiplication.
It seems almost impossible to create programs on such an limited device but I remember that I was really impressed by it because program listings (in assembly) of several meters could execute in the blink of an eye.
It's really incredible what you could do with 29GFLOPS.

A lot of it is easy to figure out, but a few items can't be confirmed until we have a teardown.

Gorilla Glass 2 is 20% thinner, so Apple took that space (and more) to put in a much bigger battery. A portion of the additional RAM will have to go to the GPU, so we don't know what end users will get in terms of free RAM.

We don't know which GPU and at what clock speed the new ipad will have. Even if the new ipad just has a 543MP4 --- it doesn't mean that it will be 50% slower graphics than the ipad 2 (i.e. double the number of GPU cores but have to push 4x the pixel count = 50% slower graphics). Maybe Apple increases the clock speed of the GPU.

No they didn't (increase the clock speed of the GPU) and that's because Apple already showed a performance sheet during the keynote. The new quad core GPU is twice as fast as the dual core GPU of the iPad2 so its cores have the same frequecy.

No they didn't (increase the clock speed of the GPU) and that's because Apple already showed a performance sheet during the keynote. The new quad core GPU is twice as fast as the dual core GPU of the iPad2 so its cores have the same frequecy.

J.

We should probably still wait for real confirmation of the clock rate.

Doubling of cores rarely translates into doubling of actual performance. If anything, an exact doubling of performance suggests a slight bump in clock speed.

We should probably still wait for real confirmation of the clock rate.

Doubling of cores rarely translates into doubling of actual performance. If anything, an exact doubling of performance suggests a slight bump in clock speed.

In this case it does. The PowerVR 543 is extremely scalable and it's performance is an almost exact multiplication of the number of cores (up to 8).
It's also unwise to overclock a GPU designed for a specific frequency, especially because that means that it's power usage will increase disproportionaly. History learns that Apple underclocks it's iPad, iPhone and iPod processors to have almost the same performance but a lot less power usage.
But I am curious about the feature size of the A5X processor. Is it 28nm or 32nm? Did they redesign the CPU and GPU for this feature size or is it just an translation to the new feature size?

In this case it does. The PowerVR 543 is extremely scalable and it's performance is an almost exact multiplication of the number of cores (up to 8).
It's also unwise to overclock a GPU designed for a specific frequency, especially because that means that it's power usage will increase disproportionaly. History learns that Apple underclocks it's iPad, iPhone and iPod processors to have almost the same performance but a lot less power usage.
But I am curious about the feature size of the A5X processor. Is it 28nm or 32nm? Did they redesign the CPU and GPU for this feature size or is it just an translation to the new feature size?

J.

Is evidence to illustrate that assertion about an exact doubling of performance with a doubling of cores. Even when hardware has very efficient scheduling, there is still overhead and software considerations.

Is evidence to illustrate that assertion about an exact doubling of performance with a doubling of cores. Even when hardware has very efficient scheduling, there is still overhead and software considerations.

Scheduling overhead is a myth. Multi-core schedulers aren't any more complex than non-trivial single core schedulers.

The place where multi-core does not get the true n-times linear increase in performance has to do with accessing shared OS resources. So the apps do get linear increase in performance for their non-sharing code, but the probability an app will need to wait for access to its own shared data or the OS to be ready to do something when the app makes an API call goes up. As OSes get better designed with more granular division of capabilities and lock-free accesses this also reduces the frequency and length of waits.

Scheduling overhead is a myth. Multi-core schedulers aren't any more complex than non-trivial single core schedulers.

The place where multi-core does not get the true n-times linear increase in performance has to do with accessing shared OS resources. So the apps do get linear increase in performance for their non-sharing code, but the probability an app will need to wait for access to its own shared data or the OS to be ready to do something when the app makes an API call goes up. As OSes get better designed with more granular division of capabilities and lock-free accesses this also reduces the frequency and length of waits.

Point being though, for most tasks there normally isn't a full doubling of performance associated with a doubling of cores. This discussion started with speculation if clock speed had remained constant or if we could infer that by a graph loosely depicting a doubling of performance. Personally, I don't think there is enough evidence yet to make a declaration either way.

It really looks like Apple beat a bunch of bugs into submission as that old IPad one is running better than it ever has.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dfiler

Wow! 4 or 5 times an hour? What sites are you visiting that result in so many crashes?

It wasn't site specific. Sometimes I'd go for a long time and then get a couple of crashes almost immediately. Other times the crashes where just plain random.

Quote:

If it isn't specific web sites, you definitely have defective hardware.

I don't think so, everything else ran fine.

Quote:

Guess you'll just have to upgrade.

Well hopefully that upgrade will be here soon. However I'm very much impressed with iOS 5.1 on this iPad 1. The whole machine runs much better and Safari is far more stable ( I've been stress testing ). If this is any indication about how the new iPad will Run then I think I will be extremely pleased when it arrives.

GPUs get almost 100% of any additional cores added as processing for this need is inherently parallel. Apps running on a CPU are an entirely different story.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dfiler

Point being though, for most tasks there normally isn't a full doubling of performance associated with a doubling of cores. This discussion started with speculation if clock speed had remained constant or if we could infer that by a graph loosely depicting a doubling of performance. Personally, I don't think there is enough evidence yet to make a declaration either way.

Well it should be obvious that the actual hardware needs to be investigated. Frankly it is a little disappointing not to see even a little gain in clock rate for either the GPU or CPU. Faster is always nice.

Point being though, for most tasks there normally isn't a full doubling of performance associated with a doubling of cores. This discussion started with speculation if clock speed had remained constant or if we could infer that by a graph loosely depicting a doubling of performance. Personally, I don't think there is enough evidence yet to make a declaration either way.

That's being awfully pessimistic. Typical average performance will be in the 180-190% range with the second core. If the app/apps are well written with no need to share data or OS functionality non-linear increases yielding performance of over 200% is possible because fewer forced context switches are needed when requesting OS services. That is possible because the second core removes the necessity for the context switch while the OS does some high-protection required internal operation such as memory management tasks. OSes are getting better at this kind of service provision. One of the most public examples of this is Apples GPU related graphics performance gains in the past couple years that are from driver OpenGL & optimizations like this. Grand Central is all about this too.

To the user without a very calibrated CPU use measuring ability, well they can't tell the difference between those small variations around the 200% threshold.

That's being awfully pessimistic. Typical average performance will be in the 180-190% range with the second core.

Not pessimistic at all. In fact that 180 to 190% is what I was getting at. If the performance did indeed double, it could suggest a minor bump in clock speed. We really won't know either way until people get their hands on them next week. Apple's graph wasn't intended for such precise analysis. I brought this up in response to speculation that the clock speed had remained the same.

Edit:

Oops, just saw the later part of your post I didn't quote was pertinent. Indeed it will be interesting to see the bench marks on what additional gpu cores achieve in iOS.

Is evidence to illustrate that assertion about an exact doubling of performance with a doubling of cores. Even when hardware has very efficient scheduling, there is still overhead and software considerations.

I don't understand your first sentence, but I believe you confuse GPU performance with CPU performance. GPUs perform tasks that are inherently parallel. The rendering of one pixel can be performed without info about rendering another pixel (*). Further, OpenGL instructions have very little data (except of course when bitmaps are transferred), so this isn't a bottleneck. They are instructions after all and the GPU issues the parallel execution.
So scheduling isn't relevant in this situation.
According to AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5663/a...new-apple-ipad) the A5X GPU has the same frequency as the A5. They use the same line of reasoning I do and add info about the benchmarks of Tegra3 and A5 processors. They also conclude that Apples info correlates to 333MHz Tegra3 GPUs versus 250MHz A5 GPUs. This makes it higly probable that the A5X GPU has the same clock frequency.

J.

(*) Note that this is a simplification ofcourse and ignores the rendering setup etc.

I don't understand your first sentence, but I believe you confuse GPU performance with CPU performance. GPUs perform tasks that are inherently parallel. The rendering of one pixel can be performed without info about rendering another pixel (*). Further, OpenGL instructions have very little data (except of course when bitmaps are transferred), so this isn't a bottleneck. They are instructions after all and the GPU issues the parallel execution.
So scheduling isn't relevant in this situation.
According to AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5663/a...new-apple-ipad) the A5X GPU has the same frequency as the A5. They use the same line of reasoning I do and add info about the benchmarks of Tegra3 and A5 processors. They also conclude that Apples info correlates to 333MHz Tegra3 GPUs versus 250MHz A5 GPUs. This makes it higly probable that the A5X GPU has the same clock frequency.

J.

(*) Note that this is a simplification ofcourse and ignores the rendering setup etc.

I meant to say "is there evidence?"

But you're still fixating on scheduling, a minor aside and a distraction from the main point. That was that we don't know yet if the clock speed has stayed the same or if it has been upgraded. The doubling seen in the graph isn't really evidence of it remaining the same.

As for perfectly parallizable computation, definitely an interesting topic. I don't want to get stuck in a debate about that. But while GPU operations are generally much more parallel, they aren't completely so. It's that _almost_ 100% that was the point.

But you're still fixating on scheduling, a minor aside and a distraction from the main point. That was that we don't know yet if the clock speed has stayed the same or if it has been upgraded. The doubling seen in the graph isn't really evidence of it remaining the same.

As for perfectly parallizable computation, definitely an interesting topic. I don't want to get stuck in a debate about that. But while GPU operations are generally much more parallel, they aren't completely so. It's that _almost_ 100% that was the point.

Another interesting point from AnandTech is that it is a possibility that the A5X feature size is still 42nm.
That would explain that the frequency is still the same (250MHz) and isn't changed to something like 333MHz.
I would expect the GPU frequency to change accordingly to the feature size if the chip design isn't changed.

Would be nice if there was a developer option to turn on true multitasking though. Sometimes I'm running a web application that gets all screwed up just because I switch over for a sec to change the music.

If that was an issue of iOS not having "true multitasking" I wouldn't also see that all the time on my Galaxy S phone. It's a memory issue not anything to do with multitasking.

Would be nice if there was a developer option to turn on true multitasking though. Sometimes I'm running a web application that gets all screwed up just because I switch over for a sec to change the music.

Then complain to the people who wrote the web application. Sounds like an application problem and not an OS problem.

"I'm way over my head when it comes to technical issues like this"Gatorguy 5/31/13

"For graphics testing, we used GLBenchmark 2, a cross-platform app for both Android and iOS. The app offers an array of detailed tests, both on-screen and off-screen, including two notable 3D tests: GLBenchmark 2.1 Egypt and GLBenchmark 2.1 Pro. While the on-screen tests allow user to watch the tests in realtime, the app currently lacks the ability to manually set the output resolution, thus limiting our ability to standardize the test across all four devices. Instead, the app ran at the native resolution of whatever device it was running on. Interestingly, the iPad 2 outperformed both the iPad 3 and Transformer Prime, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 fell far below the others.

That was to be expected. They increased the resolution by 4x and the GPU by 2x so running tests at native resolution will show the new one to be slower. The last test where they all run 720p shows the iPad 3 to be faster (50-100% faster than iPad 2 and 100-200% faster than Tegra 3).

Just like the iPhone, only the next revision will improve performance at native resolution.

So you're basically confirming what I claimed, that Java sucks. You're making excuses for poor performance on Android.

You can compile and use C++ code with ease in Android, you don't have to use Darvik. This laggy experience that people have experienced in Android 3.02 is virtually gone in Android 4.03. I to think that 3.02 was a rushed job to try and improve the tablet experience but it failed. Ice Cream Sandwich on the other had is headed in the right direction and is much better. It might not be for everyone especially the iPad user who just wants something simple and fast. Android is for those who want a little more control and customization in their OS, there is room for both to coexist in harmony.

If you don't like it then don't use it. Most of negative comments are from people who have never used Android 4.03 or is just following everyone else's que.

When I looked up "Ninjas" in Thesaurus.com, it said "Ninja's can't be found" Well played Ninjas, well played.